Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 108

88
Part One
the most important ones.30 Once more we note that on the one hånd the
subjectivity of this way of reasoning threatens to lead to a breakdown of
the scholarly discussion, while on the other being liable to lead to pene-
trating literary analysis.
In this respect Grundtvig made a particularly interesting contribution
in three competitive leetures for a readership in Nordic philology in
Copenhagen 1863 on the subject of heroic poetry, “Udsigt over den nor-
diske oldtids heroiske digtning”. Warning against a mythical as well as a
historical interpretation of heroic poetry, characteristic of German and
Scandinavian scholarship respectively, Grundtvig insisted strongly on
the autonomy of the literary point of view, and thus became an import-
ant forerunner of the later “form criticism”. Heroic poetry is neither
myth nor history, nor a mixture of the two, but rather an organic and
insoluble unity, and it must be evaluated as such. Taken as literature it
constitutes a historical faet in itself, worth far more than its possible
references to political history. A strietly literary point of view has very
seldom been applied to heroic poetry, Grundtvig remarked, and his aim
was to give a description and an interpretation both of its poetic content
and its form.
In his second leeture he tried principally to define the central themes of
the different heroic cycles, without making any distinetion between leg-
ends transmitted in poems and in prose. On the assumption that all heroic
legends of the North have their origin in poems, this distinetion was re-
garded as irrelevant to the analysis of content. In the third leeture, how-
ever, which was devoted to form, he concentrated on the preserved
poems, and on poems which may be reconstructed on the basis of prose
renderings in Saxo and other prose works, and he drafted a morphologi-
cal typology for Eddie heroic poems in their different variants - “their
occasionally more epic and occasionally more lyric, one might even say,
more dramatic manifestation”, as he put it in a somewhat tentative way.31
30 “Hovedbeviset for den episke oldtidsdigtnings hoje ælde ligger i den selv og i dens for-
hold til den historisk bekendte tids skjaldskab, der klarlig forudsætter den” (Grundtvig
1869-70: 112).
31 “Også en række af æstetiske sporsmål opstå og kræve besvarelse: om digtningens in-
dre bygning, om dens stil i sin almindelighed og i dens forskellige afarter: dens stundom
mere episke, stundom mere lyriske, også tor man vel sige: dens mere dramatiske fremtræ-
delsesformer, om de i digtningen forekommende karaktérskildringer med mere” (Grundt-
vig 1867: 17 = Grundtvig 1863: 54).